by Elias Khoury
And so ends the first chapter of the woman’s escapade, leaving her with the feeling that her visit to the Hejaz had been a failure and that she would never return home with an ode to immortalize her name in the corpus of Arabic poetry and the collections of lovers’ verse.
(Note: What puzzles me as I read this story is the veneration of the powerful with literature. What was this infatuation with poetry that made kings, princes, and governors captives of the never-ending quest for the word that would enroll them in the world of literature? Why were they so convinced that literature was a door to immortality to the extent that Seif al-Dawla, Prince of Aleppo, was willing to allow al-Mutanabbi to sit beside him and recite his verses though praise to his own glory was only a brief line in the poet’s text?
Should this impel us to take another look at the postclassical critics’ attack on praise poetry as a form of humiliation for the poet, who had to sacrifice his pride and dignity to make money? Does the former supposition mean that the phenomenon of the eulogy points not to a failure in the poetry but, more accurately, to a failure in the authority, which found itself obliged to submit to the word in its search for immortality, which can be forged only through literature and art?
This is the delusion, and the weakness, of power, for immortality is a delusion of the living, not a concern of the dead, albeit the living can read their inevitable deaths only within the framework of what they can grasp rationally. This is why they deal with their deaths as though they were going to live forever and seek immortality for their names in the register of the living – because of the register of the dead they know nothing.
Kings seek their immortality in poetry, but poetry isn’t good enough for poets, who want to turn it into prophecy, or something like it, so that they can add immortality of name to immortality of authority and then manipulate people and rule their lives from behind the veil of death. A vicious circle of illusion and the search for further illusion.)
Umm al-Banin discovered that this, the most beautiful of Arab men, was given to circumambulating the Holy House. She hesitated, however, to become involved with him, because it was said that he was mad. After all, she’d gone there to gambol on the shores of love, not fall prey to the charms of a man of whose beauty so much had been made, one who was an embodiment of the beauty of Joseph (who almost met his end as a result of his affair with Zuleika, as recounted in the Noble Book). She had heard, moreover, that the man had gone mad following his beloved’s forced marriage and affliction with leprosy. The seductive qualities of poetry were, however, too strong to resist, and she decided there was no point in sending her slave girl to him, as she had done with Kuthayyir, she would have to make her own way to “Crazy Waddah.”
She went to him with her face unveiled. She left her bedchamber wearing a slave girl’s clothes and accompanied by her slave Ghadira walked unveiled through the alleys of Mecca, the way slave girls did in those days, searching for her prey. The slave pointed out where the young man with the cracked lips walked, dazed, through the streets, as though seeing nothing. She approached him and asked him his name. The man turned, saw a face effulgent with beauty and desire, but bowed his head and looked at the ground.
Waddah stood rooted to the spot. The woman’s beauty dazzled him, and he sensed for an instant a thrill of desire. Then he went his way. She caught up with him and gave him a pitcher of water.
“You are thirsty,” she said. “Take this and drink. Your lips seek water.”
He mumbled that all the water in the world couldn’t quench his thirst.
The lovely woman didn’t catch what he said but she held the pitcher out to him and he saw her soft hands and the gleam of her fingertips and said, “No,” making as though to leave.
The woman grasped him by the wrist and cried out, “I am Rawd!”
Where had Rawda sprung from, that she should suddenly appear at the place where he was seeking to cure his insanity with disoriented wandering and minister to his morbid fear of love with love?
“You are Waddah al-Yaman?” asked the woman. “Come!”
The man followed the two women without knowing what he was doing. Was he alive or dead? Was he seeing things as they really were or had the phantom of his beloved Rawda appeared before him?
When he reached where the woman was staying and saw the beautiful slave girls around her, he understood that God had accepted his prayer and that he was meeting his beloved once more, reunited with her in death.
He sat before her and drank until he was satisfied, then recited three lines of verse:
God knows, did I desire to find within myself
yet more of love for Rawda, I’d find no augmentation.
The monks of Madyan, as I’ve observed,
weep for fear of Hell, yet maintain a seated station.
Were they to hear her, as I have, speaking,
they’d drop to their knees before her in prostration.
She asked him about his cracked lips, and he said he’d decided to treat the thirst of love with the thirst of the body. He said nothing resembles love so much as thirst for water because love is the water of the soul, and he’d decided to punish himself because he’d abandoned his beloved when he saw her diseased body cracking open and her soul wandering blindly among the shadows of death.
The words came.
From the man who hadn’t said a single word since he’d found himself confronted with his beloved’s illness and who people believed had been struck with insanity in the shape of silence, the words flowed like water, while the woman, who had wanted only to dally with poetry and poets, found herself captive to a feeling she’d never known before because she was living it for the first time in her life.
She began to laugh and cry, approach and withdraw, listen to the poetry and drink in the words, stretch out her hand to Waddah and fly with him, as he with her.
She questioned him and he questioned her. She kissed him and he kissed her, and instead of asking him to write verse about her, she became the poem. She surrendered to the rhythm that enfolded her and entered into the rhyming magic that we call passion, and she understood why the Omayyad poet al-Farazdaq, on passing a mosque in Kufa and hearing a man reciting from the “Suspended Ode of Labid,” had prostrated himself. Asked why, he replied, “Your vocation is the prostration of the Koran, mine the prostration of poetry.”
That day, the woman came to know the prostration of poetry, so she prostrated herself, and came to learn the meaning of love, so she loved.
What happened that day?
Did things really get mixed up in the poet’s head, making him believe he was face-to-face with his beloved Rawda, now cured? Or had his heart – fickle like those of all sons of Adam – found in this woman a new love that made him forget the old?
And was that new woman’s name really “Rawd,” as she claimed?
Fickleness was a curse with which our friend had been stricken without realizing. Probably, Waddah felt the story was enough in itself. He saw himself at the peak of passion’s mountain, the only way down from which leads to the valley of death, and he chose this ending, reminiscent of that of a hero in a story. He went mad, or pretended to, thereby elaborating a new chapter among the stories of those who lose their wits to love. When Qays’s, or Mad-over-Layla’s, beloved married, his love for her increased, for it was now joined by jealousy, transforming the embers into fire, obsession into insanity. Nothing sets love afire like jealousy – as though love needs that extra fire to turn the lover into a mass of flames and feelings and take him to an abasement beyond which there can be no other.
There can be no passion without this abasement, which breaks manhood down and forces the lover to turn into a simpleton, or a sucker, or a mixture of both.
Fate, however, willed that Waddah’s story should take a different turn. The moment he saw Rawda’s corroded body, the fires of jealousy died in his hea
rt, and this made his story of mourning and despair different from those of his fellow lovers, because he discovered that as life rots in the beloved’s body, love rots too.
Waddah al-Yaman went to Mecca to complete the story’s circle by circumambulating the Black Stone, announcing, by so doing, that he had decided to bury himself inside his story.
Waddah al-Yaman didn’t know that what he thought was the end of the story was in fact its beginning, that his tragic tale was just starting when he met the woman whom people called Umm al-Banin and who, face unveiled, barred his path in a Meccan alleyway so that she might invite him to the coffer of his death and of his love by proclaiming she was Rawd.
Were Waddah al-Yaman to speak, he’d tell us how the name shook him to the core as it left the woman’s lips, and how he felt it wrap itself around the woman’s body, making it into a new form for his beloved.
Was this memory’s trickery or its magic?
Waddah al-Yaman had no idea how the face before him had become the face of his beloved. He heard the name, and the features sketched themselves anew and the Rawd of now became the Rawda of then and his passion entered a new phase, one that none of the earlier poets of the age had entered.
Though here, perhaps, we should reference the story that brought about the death of Imru’ al-Qays, namely, his love for the daughter of the Emperor of Byzantium. The poet and monarch of Kinda went to the emperor to ask for his support against his father’s killers, but instead of returning in a royal procession to reclaim his lost throne, he returned wrapped in a poisoned cloak, given him by the emperor. The poet had fallen in love with the daughter of Byzantium’s monarch, and his reward was a poisoned cloak that covered his body with sores like those of a leper. He died near Antioch or, according to another report, near Homs, and was buried next to a nameless stranger at the foot of a mound known as Jabal Assib.
Was the cloak the errant king’s coffer? And was the first Rawda’s leprosy a reiteration of the sores of Imru’ al-Qays?
Waddah al-Yaman didn’t dare compare himself to Imru’ al-Qays, and it never crossed his mind to recite the famous lines of the errant king:
Neighbor, our graves lie close
and what Assib once erected I dwell within.
Neighbor, we’re two strangers here together,
and every stranger to every other is kin.
Did Waddah al-Yaman, at his death, confuse Qays ibn al-Mulawwah with Imru’ al-Qays?
Such a confusion would probably have angered the two poets: the first was an Udhri poet who loved just one woman and adopted her name, the second a poet, king, drunkard, and debauchee, to whom no woman was ever more than a passing fancy.
Stories, however, like lives, have their fates, which cannot be reversed.
The Coffer of Death
(POINT OF ENTRY 5)
SAID THE CHRONICLER: “No one knows how the game turned to tragedy. The encounter with the caliph’s wife who had left the palace with her face unveiled, dressed like a slave girl, was almost dreamlike.
“Waddah al-Yaman could believe neither his ears nor his eyes. He heard her say, ‘I am Rawd!’ and saw her as though seeing his murdered beloved, and his life became a dream from which he awoke only in the coffer of love, which the chroniclers would refer to as the coffer of death.”
Umm al-Banin was a dream. That’s how the other poet, Ubaydallah ibn Qays al-Ruqayyat, saw her. But what was the relationship between this other Omayyad poet, Umm al-Banin, and her love story?
Ubaydallah ibn Qays al-Ruqayyat was poet to so many women that instead of adopting the name of his first love, Ruqayya, according to the custom of the poets of the day, he took its plural, making Ruqayya into Ruqayyat. The man wasn’t faithful to one woman, and it’s likely that to him love was no more than the “ordered speech” of verse making. He was, however, the master of a new genre of poetry to which the critics gave the name “the satirical love lyric.” Its apogee was his love poetry addressed to Umm al-Banin, wife of the caliph al-Walid ibn Abd al-Malik, through which he sought to enrage and make a public spectacle of her husband.
This poet isn’t going to find a place for himself in the story of Waddah al-Yaman. His love poem to Umm al-Banin, though scandalous and obscene by the standards of the day, played no role in deciding the fate of Waddah or that of the story’s heroine. If I weren’t such an admirer of that poem of his, I wouldn’t have spent any time on it at all. In fact, I prefer to believe that al-Ruqayyat wasn’t the author of the poem in question, that its attribution to him was due to the political struggles of the period, and that its true author must have been Waddah al-Yaman. Its svelte and magical lines must have been the message that preceded the latter to Damascus, to which he would go in search of his beloved after the queen returned to her own country.
* * *
—
Some might say I’m imitating Hammad, the great chronicler of poetry from the Abbasid age, who stands accused by the critics of having made up thousands of the lines of verse that he attributed to the pre-Islamic poets, or to the apocryphal poets. Such a comparison makes no sense to me: I don’t possess the talent of Hammad, who, if everything that is attributed to him were really his, would have been the greatest poet of the Arabic language bar none. By the same token, all I’m doing is following my intuition, which tells me that this poem will play a decisive role in settling the fate of the poet of the coffer.
After they met, the second Rawda, or Umm al-Banin, was transformed into a kind of dream. Before he left her tent, she asked him to come to Damascus and promised she would intercede on his behalf with her husband the caliph, so he may write eulogies to him and live under his protection.
The second Rawda returned to Damascus, and Waddah fell captive to a new passion.
Was the first Rawda expunged, the new woman taking her place? Or did the poet combine the two into one woman, as the writer of these lines tends to believe?
I prefer to suppose that he fused them, since the effort needed to accept the first supposition puts me off: exchanging a woman who had died – or was in the process of dying – for another, strikes me as an act so immoral it would ruin the story and make it difficult to write. The literature of love cannot mirror human cruelty, which would reach a new zenith if the emotions were to be brutalized through a swap of the sort we are discussing here. Such an act would raise many questions as to the meaning of love; it might even turn love into an empty and meaningless word.
All the same, such things do in fact happen, which is why I’m confused. The ancient chroniclers of Waddah’s story paid no attention to the apparent swap, and the shift of the Yemeni poet from a first love that ended with the beloved woman’s death to a second that would end up killing the lover created no problem for them. They didn’t question the meaning of this shift from an old passion to a new, both of them fatal. Were the chroniclers seeking to establish a secondary parallelism that would point to the fact that love takes place between two deaths?
In our story, things are not so. Waddah was stricken with something akin to madness, and his encounter with the first Rawda in the lepers’ valley, where he saw how his beloved’s skin had cracked and her spirit had been broken, was the moment that made him indifferent to everything and incapable of distinguishing between truth and illusion, or fact and fiction.
At the moment when Umm al-Banin, or the second Rawda, appeared, things got mixed up in his head. Once again, he found himself unable to tell where or who he was, or whom he was with, up to the moment when he found himself in the coffer.
Now let’s get back to the story, where we discover that, on Umm al-Banin’s return to Damascus, the poet became strangely enraptured with sleep and love, or with love while asleep, if one can speak of such a thing – a rapture that took on the appearance of a dream. No sooner would the poet wake than he’d fall asleep again. In the world of sleep, which became his refuge, he discovered tranquili
ty and love, and in his waking moments, when he would drink milk and chew on dates, poetry would come to him in the form of flashbacks from his dozings. Stammering as he declaimed his poem – because he wasn’t composing verse, he was remembering verse he’d composed while asleep – he would say of Rawda and Umm al-Banin, who had now become one woman:
For Umm al-Banin, when
her passion draws her close –
In my sleep I saw her,
and while I took her said this verse:
No sooner had I taken my pleasure in her
and her sweet lips had toward me turned
Than I drank from the well of her mouth till
my thirst was quenched, and she drank in turn,
And I remained her happy bedfellow,
she pleasing me, I pleasing her,
Making her laugh and making her cry,
being her vestment and stripping her bare.
When people told him, “Fool! Don’t you know these verses will lead to your death?” he’d shrug his shoulders to show how little he cared.
Some chroniclers state that this and other love poems like it weren’t written by Waddah al-Yaman but by a jinn who, tormented by the sufferings of love, appeared in Waddah’s dreams and dictated his poems on Umm al-Banin to him. Others set these poems within the framework of the bruising political struggles between the Omayyads and their enemies and attribute them to other poets. It was in this context that Ubaydallah ibn Qays al-Ruqayyat made his appearance in the story and that the poem was attributed to him.
What matters as far as we’re concerned is that word of these poems reached Umm al-Banin, who was now living in Damascus; she discovered that her game had turned serious, and that the only thing she now wanted was her beloved.
All she did about it was order her slave girl Ghadira to address her by her new name of Rawd. Now she had two names – Rawd for her poet and her slave and Umm al-Banin for everyone else.